An Interview with Dr. E. Michael Jones on The
Jewish Revolutionary Spirit

by Martin Vianney

It
was once said of Michael Jones that he was too radical to be a conservative and
too conservative to be a radical. There is one word that always describes the
man and his writing. Controversial. Jones, however, would say that a different
word describes his writing. Catholic. And he would doubtless add that if one
writes in the modern age as a Catholic one is necessarily controversial. However, even by these
standards Michael Jones’ latest book, The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History, is his most
controversial and ambitious book to date. At 1,200 pages this tour of history
which shines a theological light on conflicts between Catholics, Protestants,
Jews and revolutionaries though the ages is intended to provide a key to
understanding the present age. I discussed the book with Dr
Jones and tried to find out the thesis of the book and explore some of the
difficult theological and political issues it brings up.

1. What made you decide to write
this book?

Reading Daniel Goldhagen’s
attack on Pius XII. Suddenly, I realized that all of the talk about a new era
of Catholic/Jewish relations following Vatican II was a decidedly one-way
street. Virtually every celebration of Nostra Aetate’s various
anniversaries was characterized by Catholics apologizing for everything from
St. John’s Gospel to the Holocaust and Jews renewing their attacks on the
Church as the font of all anti-Semitism with renewed chutzpah.

2. Were you surprised by the size
of the undertaking?

The surprise came when I
realized that the book was 1,200 pages long, in spite of a rather rigorous
paring down during the editing process.

3. What do you mean by Jewish?

A Jew is now a rejecter of
Christ and thereby to some extent a rejecter of Logos, which is the Greek word
for the rational order of the universe. Insofar as they rejected Christ, the
Jews rejected Logos, and in rejecting Logos, they rejected the order of the
universe, including its moral or political order. As a result, they became
revolutionaries, a decision they solemnly ratified when they chose Barabbas
over Christ.

4. But even your book allows that there is some racial element. After all,
many rejecters of Christ/Logos are not Jews. And the Jews are seen in the
New Testament as a distinct people who will perdure until the End Times when
there is a prophecy of conversion. So surely a Jew is not a rejecter of
Christ/Logos simpliciter?

A
Jew is an ethnic Jew who has rejected Christ. An ethnic Jew who has accepted
Christ is not a Jew. Ethnicity is the necessary but not sufficient condition
for being a Jew. The sufficient condition is rejection of Christ. This was
ratified by the Israeli Supreme Court when they denied Oswald Rufeisen
citizenship because he had been baptized a Catholic. From a more religious
perspective I note in the book the words of Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner:
“While not all Jews practice Judaism [it is] the iron-clad consensus among contemporary
Jews, Jews who practice Christianity cease to be part of the ethnic Jewish
community, while those who practice Buddhism remain within.”

5. What relation, then, does
Judaism have with the religion of the Old Testament? What place do the Temple,
the Torah and the Talmud have in Judaism?

Judaism is not the religion
of the Old Testament. Catholicism is the religion of the Old Testament.
Anything that claims to be the religion of the Old Testament must have a
Temple, a priesthood, and sacrifice. After the destruction of the Temple in 70
AD, Judaism had none of these things, but the Church had all of them. The
Temple was Christ, who explicitly stated that he was its replacement. The
Church also had the priesthood, which celebrated the new sacrifice, which was
the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass.

Judaism as we know it is a
religion that was created by Jochanan ben Zacchai after the destruction of the
Temple. It was, as Jews have to admit, not the Old Testament religion, because
the Jews at that point had no Temple to perform the sacrifices which were
needed to fulfill their covenant. As a result, the Jewish religion became a
debating society or school, which met at synagogues. The codification of those
debates became known as the Talmud, which got written down between the third
and seventh centuries AD. The Talmud is a systematic distortion of the Torah—“Whatever
the Torah forbids, the Talmud permits”—whose purpose is to keep the Jewish
people away from Logos and in bondage to Jewish leaders.

6. What do you mean
by Revolutionary?

Any attempt to overthrow the
state or the cultural order of a particular people and replace it with one or
other version of Messianic politics which promises us all heaven on earth but
ends up delivering something quite different.

7. But surely there are cultural orders that are largely at odds with Logos.
Should not these be overthrown? Moreover, are people like Caiaphas and Annas
revolutionaries? Many would regard them rather as reactionaries, fearful of the
people’s reception of what they took to be a worldly Messiah.

In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI reminds Catholics that the way of
revolution, the way of Spartacus and Simon bar Kokhba, is not the Catholic way.
He says this knowing, I'm sure, that Aquinas justifies the overthrow of unjust
regimes in some instances. We don't know if Annas and Caiaphas would have
joined in the revolution against Rome over 30 years after Christ's death. I
think it is reasonable to think that they would.

8. What do you mean by Spirit?

What the Germans call Geist,
which is to say what Aristotle and Plato would call “form,” as in “the soul is
the form of the body.”

9. Christians today appear to be
most at risk of persecution in Islamic countries and places like China. Aren't
these places where the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit never took hold?

10. But in terms of killing and degradation you still need to account for
the enormities which continue to be committed in these countries. One is not
banned on pain of death from hearing Mass in the US so we cannot dismiss
the persecution in other parts of the world, parts not obviously infected with
the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. Bloody persecution has often been more
effective in wiping out Christians than ethnic cleansing of a non-lethal
kind. Where do states like China and Saudi Arabia fit with regard to the Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit?

The Gospel tells us not to
fear those who can kill the body. I think the point is that there are worse
things in this life than physical persecution. Moral corruption is one of them
because it kills the soul. And if one thing characterizes the Catholics of the
babyboomer generation it is moral corruption, for which they bear
responsibility, but we're talking, nonetheless, about a moral corruption which
was foisted on them by their parents' generation, through the media, through
the corruption of Catholic education, and all of the insidious means I
described in Libido Dominandi.
The last time I looked China was a communist country. Communism is one of the
prime examples of the Jewish revolutionary spirit. Saudi Arabia is run by the
Wahhabi sect of Islam. I do not deal with the relationship of Islam to Judaism
in the book, but in it you'll find a milder form of the rejection of the cross
and suffering in favor of a more carnal vision of worldly power and wealth.

11. What do you say to people who
view the Islamic world as a greater threat to the world than this Jewish
Spirit?

It depends which “people”
you mean. I can understand why Serbs, given their history, would view Islam as
a greater threat than the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, although they certainly
suffered under the imposition of Communism. However, when I hear an American
talk about the dangers of “Islamofascism,” I think it’s an infallible sign that
I am in the presence of either a propagandist, an intellectual coward or a
useful idiot.

12. Whatdo you take the term anti-Semitism to mean?

Anti-Semitism is a form of
biological determinism or racism which claims that Jews are prisoners of their
DNA. This would manifest itself in the Church, for instance, if someone were to
say that a Jewish convert could not be trusted. This ugly attitude has always
been repudiated by the Church, which has always maintained that Jewish converts
are to be accepted “without calumny.” It came out very clearly in Erasmus’s
attack on Pfefferkorn, which I cover in my book.Anti-Semitism is the flip side of Jewish racism, which
claims that Jews are superior because of their DNA. This idea is put forth by
the Jews who question Jesus in the Gospel of St. John. They claim that they are
somehow racially superior to everyone else because they are the “seed of
Abraham.” A recent manifestation of this racial outlook was the Charles Murray
symposium on Jewish intelligence held at the American Enterprise Institute.

13. But aren’t there forms of anti-Semitism that are not explicitly racial?
For example, if someone shows a great propensity to believe the worst of Jews in
spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, is he not an bigoted
anti-Semite (just as someone might be an anti-Catholic who believes all priests
are child abusers in spite of the evidence), even if he has no beliefs about
inferior DNA?

No, anti-Semitism is a
racial concept. Being anti-Jewish is something else. It can be rational, as,
for example, in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles, where it is a
manifestation of the rejection of the rejection of Christ that is obligatory
for all Christians, or it can be irrational, but it's fundamentally different
from anti-Semitism, which is racial.

14.In
your book you refer to your friend the late Rabbi Dresner, a highly moral Jew
(and author of Can Families Survive in Pagan AmericaandRachel). Does he not represent a type of Judaism that takes the Torah
seriously and is thoroughly Jewish yet not infected with a Revolutionary
Spirit?

Yes, I wish Rabbi Dresner
were alive today. He was a man who was open to the truth and, incidentally, an
admirer of my writing, who would urge the Catholics he knew to support me by
subscribing to Culture Wars. On the
other hand, he would also write to me and chastise me for talking about Jewish
villains. He came to the defense of Leo Pfeffer, who in my opinion was a Jewish
villain if ever there was one. So he was torn, as I said in the article I did
on him after his death, between Torah and Ethnos. I have no doubt that he was a
sincere follower of Torah. But he was also troubled by the fact that virtually
every prominent Jew in America—he was particularly annoyed by the cult of Woody
Allen—was a proponent of some sort of revolutionary subversion of the moral
law. As I said, I wish he were alive today. I would like to know what he would
have thought of The Jewish Revolutionary
Spirit.

15. You refer to neoconservatism
as a Jewish movement, yet the majority of Jews in the US are opposed to it,
just as they were to the Iraq war.

We’re talking about
successive revolutionary movements here. Most Jews still retain an ancestral
allegiance to the Messianic ideologies known as Marxism, socialism,
communism—in general—the ideologies of the left that were regnant among
American Jews during the middle of the 20th century. Zionism didn’t
really catch on among American Jews until the collapse of the Black-Jewish
alliance and the 1967 Six-Day Arab Israeli war.

16. Yet you certainly see Neoconservatism as a Jewish Revolutionary
movement. Why do you think this and could you tell us what you think
Neoconservatism is?

First of all, Irving
Kristol, the founding father of neoconservatism, was a Trotskyite during his
college years. If you look at the tenets of neoconservatism--perpetual war, the
uprooting of social structures, hierarchies, classes - you see that all the
major elements of Trotsky's version of messianic politics have been maintained,
mutatis mutandis, with the United States instead of the Soviet Union now being
the land that is going to liberate the world.

17. You seem to see Protestantism
as an inherently Judaizing religion. Can you explain why?

Because when the Catholics
who wanted to break with the Church needed an alternative authority that was as
authoritative as the Church they invariably turned to the Old Testament. John
Milton’s treatise on divorce, in which he appeals to Moses as a greater
authority on the issue than Christ, who clearly forbade what Milton wanted to
have approved, is a classic instance of what I’m talking about. Judaizing also
flowed naturally from the Protestant notion of sola scriptura. If the Bible is our only guide, it’s quite natural
that the Old Testament will predominate in any question, because there are more
books in the Old Testament, and, from a carnal point of view, they are also a
lot more interesting. The Old Testament detached from the New Covenant and the
Church becomes a gross distortion of what it is meant to be.

18. Aren't some of the great
critics of Judaism Protestants - e.g. Martin Luther and Johannes Andreas
Eisenmenger. Why should this be?

I can’t speak for
Eisenmenger, but I do know that Luther was extremely pro-Jewish at the
beginning of his career, operating under the principle that the enemy of his
enemy (in this case, Rome) must be his friend. Luther also felt that once the
Jews were exposed to the gospel in its purity (i.e., as preached by Martin
Luther), the Jews would convert in droves. When this didn’t happen, Luther (who
was nothing if not choleric) turned on the Jews and wrote the violent diatribe
against them in the 1540s for which the Lutherans have been apologizing ever
since.

19. What is the relation between
Freemasonry and the Jewish Revolutionary Spirit?

Freemasonry is another word
for what Frances Yates would call “Christian Cabala.” It was the “scientific”
reaction to the excesses of the Judaizing Englishmen known as Puritans. But the
“science” in question derived, via people like Fludd, Bacon, and John Dee, from
the Cabala, which was Jewish magic.

20. Arguably the most important
European revolution was the French Revolution (not to mention the English
Reformation). Yet in the French Revolution there is no evidence of extensive
Jewish involvement. Doesn't this present a problem for your thesis?

The French Revolution was a
black operation which, as they invariably do, got out of control. The Whigs who
came to power in England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 used the Masonic
lodges on the continent to spread Enlightenment propaganda among the Catholic
French in order to bring down the House of Bourbon. Voltaire was, as Alexander
Pope suspected, a Whig operative and spy. The goal was to bring about the
French version of the Glorious Revolution, but when that black operation took
on a life of its own and careened out of control, the English were appalled by
what they had wrought and declared war on France.

So the French revolution
derived from Freemasonry, which was, as I stated above, a form of Cabala. This,
of course, rightly leaves the whole question of direct Jewish involvement in
the French Revolution out of the picture. But as Daniel Pipes has pointed out, the evidence is there, even if not
as he would portray it. When Barruel got the evidence, in the letter from
Simonini, he simply suppressed the evidence, even though he received a letter
from both the pope and Napoleon’s uncle supporting Simonini’s allegations.

21. You have much to say about
Russia but say very little about Stalin's anti-Semitism. Why, according to you,
were the Jews persecuted by Stalin's revolutionary movement?

Because every successful
revolution leads to a civil war. The Stalin-Trotsky split was inevitable
because the victors always quarrel after they win, and the Jew/Goy split in
Communism was the ethnic fault-line that no one could ignore.

22. Explain what you mean when
you say the Jews rejected Christ/killed Christ. Are you saying that all the
Jews in Jerusalem rejected Christ or only some? Are Jews today guilty of
deicide? If so, how does this fit in with the idea that all sinners share
responsibility for Christ's suffering?

No, obviously not. Many Jews
accepted Christ as the Messiah. The situation becomes confusing because of how
St. John, for one example, handles the term “Jew.” By the end of his Gospel,
it’s clear that Jew no longer has a purely ethnic meaning. A Jew is primarily
someone who rejects Christ. The ethnic Jews who did not reject Christ became
known as the Church or the New Israel, at which point blood, DNA were not the
point. Nostra Aetate says that “not
all Jews at the time of Christ” were guilty of calling for his death.
Logically, this, of course, means that some Jews at the time of his death were
guilty of deicide. Using the definition of the Jew which St. John formulated,
we could say that only Jews were responsible for his death. Those Jews also
ratified that death when they said “Let his blood be on us and our children.”
We are not talking about some occult “blood curse,” as some modern day Jews
like to portray it. We are talking about a profound and premeditated form of
rejection—murder being the ultimate form of rejection—that has perdured to this
day. As long as Jews perdure in rejection they will be in the avant garde (as
Marx would call it) of revolutionary ferment. Every Christian who sins
participates in the rejection of Christ, but they will never constitute an
avant garde like Jews because they cannot pervert their status as God’s chosen
people because they never enjoyed that status.

23. But wouldn't what you have said make Pilate a Jew? And might there not
have been a mass of Jews in Jerusalem who were merely indifferent to Christ?

Pilate, as a matter of fact,
did feel that he was being drawn into a Jewish struggle. That's why he said at
one point, "Am I a Jew?" If Pilate felt that way, then the Jews felt
the same thing to a much greater degree, to the point where I would say that,
at a certain level, no one in Jerusalem at that time was indifferent to Christ.
The entire adult Jewish population was either for him or against him. In a
sense, all of us have to become one kind of Jew or another, either the kind of
Jew who accepted Christ or the kind who rejected him. The United States today
is a Jewish country, which is to say a country where the culture is controlled
by those Jews who rejected Christ. Any follower of those Jews who accepted
Christ is going to be persecuted. As Yuri Slezkine said in his book The Jewish Century, modernity has turned
us all into Jews.

24. IsNostra Aetate a document that preaches error with regard to the Jews?

No.

25. What are your thoughts on the
papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, and especially on his handling of Catholic-Jewish
relations?

The pope has shown a lack of
even-handedness in dealing with Muslims and Jews, symbolized best by his trip
to Cologne. The pope went to the synagogue in Cologne, where he was insulted by
the rabbi there, but the Muslims had to come to meet with him at the chancery
office. The pope wags his finger at the Muslims, but he never chastises the
Jews in his meetings with them. I think the Muslims are offended by this double
standard. Islamic terrorism did not spring full-blown from the mind of Zeus.
Much of it is a function of Israeli behavior in Palestine and American support
of those policies. To mention the former without mentioning the latter is a
manifestation of the double standard they’re talking about. The classical
Catholic position was articulated in the title of Raimondo Martini’s book: Pugio Fidei adversos Mauros et Iudeos,
or The Dagger of Faith aimed at Moors and
Jews.

26. But did not this same pope bring back and amend the Good Friday prayer
calling for the conversion of the Jews, thereby showing he was not to be
intimidated in these matters?

As to the pope, I think he
realized that the Church stood at the brink of the abyss when he ascended to
the throne of Peter. If he had not written that prayer, he would have denied
the Gospels, and no pope will ever do that. But this doesn’t change the fact
that he is not even-handed in dealing with Jews and Muslims.

27. Some people find your
language harsh and yet uncritical of Catholic behaviour in the past. Does it
worry you that some Jewish readers may be put off by this and become less
likely to embrace the Church?

This reminds me of a
discussion I had about another book I wrote. The title I chose was “Nigger
Hell.” When the publisher felt that that title was offensive, I offered to
change it to “Nigger Heck.”The
real issue though is that the title was a direct quote taken from Claude
McKay’s book Home to Harlem. This is
the language that was used at the time, and I felt it was better to use that
than capitulate to the sensibilities of the school marms and the commissars.

The same is true of The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. The
shocking part is not so much what I say but what I report other people saying.
I have been called an anti-Semite (in Prague, to be specific) for quoting
Christ’s statement to the Jews, “Your father is Satan.’” I have been called an
anti-Semite for using the phrase “the synagogue of Satan,” as if I had made up
the term, when I was citing the Book of Revelation. Similarly, I get blamed when a term like “the vomit of
Judaism” appears in my book, when the phrase comes from St. Bernard of
Clairvaux. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Nothing I have said is
as pointed or as “anti-Semitic” as what the evangelists, church fathers, and
even Jesus Christ has said before me. The Jews of Jesus’ time found language
like this off-putting, so I’m not surprised that some Jews would feel the same
way today. On the other hand, there are always going to be the “true Hebrews”
like Nathaniel, a man without guile, who will respond to the truth when they
hear it.

28. And what do you say to the
criticism that you have a tendency to minimize or underestimate the bad
behavior of those claiming to be Catholic, seeing their behavior, at worst, as
reactive to Jewish faults? Surely there is much wrong on both sides, with
Catholics having less excuse?

Anyone who reads my book
will know that this isn’t true. There’s plenty of blame to go around here.

29. What have been the
consequences to you in undertaking this controversial work? Knowing what
you now know, would you do it all again?

Would Zebedee’s sons have
drunk from the cup if they had known what drinking from it entailed? Probably
not. That’s why Jesus doesn’t let us peek into a crystal ball before he asks us
to do something.

30. What has been your experience
of Jewish people throughout your life? Did you ever discuss the ideas in your
book with them?

From 1966 until 1979 (with
the exception of the three years that I spent in Germany), I spent most of my
time hanging around with Jews, primarily in the art world (working for Sam
Maitin, the Philadelphia artist, and at the Prints for People art gallery,
which involved me in hanging shows at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed synagogue
on Old York Road) but in the literary world in Philadelphia as well (through
Robert Summers, the playwright, who was my creative writing teacher, poetry
readings at the Painted Bride, and graduate school in English and American
Literature at Temple University, where Stanley Fish, the “Reader-Response”
literary theorist, was one of my teachers). I was also a camp counselor at a
summer camp for handicapped children sponsored by the Variety Club, which was a
Jewish organization. I have lost contact with just about everyone from that
era, but I did discuss the idea of the book with my friend Paul Goldstein in
its formative stages.

The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World
History by E. Michael Jones. Jews for Jesus versus Jews against
Jesus; Christians versus Christians versus Jews. This book is the story of such
contests played out over 2000 turbulent years. In his most ambitious work yet,
Dr. E. Michael Jones provides a breathtaking and controversial tour of history
from the Gospels to the French Revolution to Neoconservatism and the "End
of History." A Must Read. $48 + S&H,
Hardback. [In
ordering for shipment outside the U.S., the book's price will appear higher to
offset increased shipping charges.] Read
Reviews